Arch Linux

rompi

Member

Registered: 2018-10-13

Posts: 1

urxvt misc-fixed bold font unreadable, while xterm looks perfect

Hi,

I performed a fresh install of Arch today.  I have nothing installed
except X11, icewm, Firefox, xterm and urxvt.  (I also installed Gimp
to make a screenshot).  The configuration is totally stock.  I have no
.Xresources, and no .Xdefaults in my home directory.
LANG="en_US.UTF-8".

I love the typeface "Fixed", which is also the
default X Window Font, for example in xterm.

I prefer urxvt over xterm, but unfortunately, on my machine, bold text
is not displayed correctly in urxvt, while it comes out right in
xterm.

Please have a look at a screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/7rVVRH1.png or https://imgur.com/a/O2uQv8Q.

I found an Arch Wikipage about urxvt font declation methods.

Setting

URXvt.font

or

URXvt.boldFont

works fine as long I do it
through xft (

xft:whatever...

).  I tried many variants, and it is hard
to interpret the sometimes surprising results I got, but in the end I
failed to select the stock X11 unaliased bold variant of "Fixed" that
I see in xterm.

The Wikipage also mentions

/usr/share/fonts/misc/fonts.alias

, and
gives a few examples about selecting bitmap fonts.  Neither the
examples, nor any string from

fonts.alias

worked on my machine.

I spend a lot of time browsing the forum, and it seems as if
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=237743 describes the same
symptoms. 

Later I installed xfontsel.  While I can select the regular variant of
misc-fixed, a bold variant does not seem to be available.

$ pacman -Q | grep xorg-fonts
xorg-fonts-100dpi 1.0.3-3
xorg-fonts-75dpi 1.0.3-3
xorg-fonts-alias 1.0.3-2
xorg-fonts-encodings 1.0.4-5

I'm sure that this problem has something to do with the default xft
configuration, but I can't think of anything else to try.  I'm sure
that I'm not the only urxvt-using lover of "Fixed" out there, so help
would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Paul

boban_dj

Member

Registered: 2015-03-17

Posts: 150

Re: urxvt misc-fixed bold font unreadable, while xterm looks perfect

@Paul, I have installed rxvt-unicode https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/rxvt-unicode
in .Xresources :

$ cat .Xresources
#include ".Xresources.d/xterm"
#include ".Xresources.d/urxvt-unicode"

in .Xresources.d: .xterm and urxvt-unicode
see gist: https://gist.github.com/boban-dj/34ff71 … file-xterm
and https://gist.github.com/boban-dj/08dac2 … 6c17f020d7

no more issues with bold